Shareholder attempts CART shake-up

Since CART was floated on the New York stock exchange in the beginning of 1998 two boards have run the company. One is the franchise board, which comprises all the team owners, and it was this group that voted to change CART's engine rules in 2003. The other group is the public company's Delaware board of directors, which comprises team owners Jerry Forysthe, Chip Ganassi, Barry Green, Carl Haas, Pat Patrick, Derrick Walker and five outside directors.

Vannini, who owns eight per cent of CART's publicly-traded stock, appears to advocate the replacement of the team owners with other outside directors, and also wants to give the overall boss expanded powers to properly run the company.

"The team owners are one of, if not the critical and key ingredients to your product offering," says Vannini. "But at any given point in time, the real and potential conflicts are such that in protecting their own interests as any sound business person would do, it dramatically slows down the speed and the efficacy of the decision-making process. To have five or six of those individuals figuratively, or literally, in control of the board of directors makes it virtually impossible for a chief executive or chairman to articulate and execute on a strategy in a timely manner. It makes it virtually impossible to function.

"Rather than pick and chose who will stay or go among those individuals, it may be easier to seek a solution where none of the team owners are represented on the Delaware board, and are instead replaced by people with extensive business experience who operate in the normal corporate board function, which is purely in an advisory capacity to the CEO."

Long Beach promoter Chris Pook campaigned unsuccessfully for the CART CEO job twelve months ago, and although Vannini said he has nothing against current boss Joe Heitzler, he says Pook is a prime candidate to run CART in the future.

"The list of qualified candidates is extremely limited and I would not quarrel with the characterisation of Chris Pook as the natural candidate," he said. "Is he the only candidate? Certainly not. Is he the natural candidate? Clearly."